Morning Memories: February , 2018

Each branch of the service has its own way of communicating I suppose. I know the US Navy used to, some of it even repeatable.

I got the biggest kick out of a freshly-minted ensign while he was standing his first “Quarter Deck Watch,” on the old US Hunley, AS-31. They had sentenced me to a year and a half aboard her when I finished my tour “in-country.” I stood plenty of watches on the old quarterdeck, mindlessly ringing the ship’s bell and communicating orders via my bosun’s pipe to surly sailors still hung over from a night ashore.

You are aware, I suppose, of the phrase “red skies at night, sailor’s delight” and “red skies in the morning, sailors take warning.” It may surprise you to learn that it had more to do, in the old days, with whorehouse districts than with the weather. That’s a free tidbit.

Anyway, about that fresh young ensign, ready to make John Paul Jones proud, wherever his nautical bones rested. There was a little ordeal they put him through. The shipmates in the engine room would do it on purpose. To tell the truth, most anything a sailor does has a purpose, sometimes mired in antiquity and sometimes popping new and full blown from minds plagued with too much time available for breeding mischief.

It was done, usually on a slow weekend day. That’s when they let young ensigns rule the quarterdeck. The Navy of the late 1960s believed the commies were least likely to launch their mongrel hordes at us on a weekend. I’m not sure. They never did, though, so maybe it’s true.

Anyhow, the guys from below decks would send a squad “up and aft” to the fantail of our proud vessel and catch the fledgling officer in a moment of reverie. With a solemnity that would have made Bull Halsey shake his head in wonder, they would approach the unsuspecting officer, assume the position, salute and, in voice worthy of launching a nuclear attack, bellow, “Request permission to jack the shaft, … sir.”

The enlisted on duty, including myself, would suddenly find something that occupied every shred of attention in their being. Neither help nor solace was nigh for the self-imagined hero.

One thing they teach at “The Academy” is never to appear confused or bewildered in front of the enlisted. I think it started with the Phoenicians and filtered through history like a tenuous gene. Officers followed the rule the way a blackjack dealer follows the numbers.

But, “jack the shaft?”

It couldn’t be a nautical joke, perpetrated by the lower ranks. Officers didn’t rate such an honor. You never saw an officer being sent to fetch “six phantoms or waterline” or to stand “mail-buoy watch.” Perhaps they had their own pranks, the officers. I don’t know. They were a mirthless lot, so somehow I doubt it.

But, “jack the shaft?”

They had a way of asking it, those enginemen, that made it sound only slightly less important than a surgeon requesting a scalpel while removing a brain tumor.

It was always more fun to watch the episode if the officer in question had to pause and allow someone to walk past the quarterdeck in the middle of things. To come onto the ship, you had to salute the flag, salute the Officer of the Deck, and say “Request permission to come aboard, sir,” as if, on this great planet Earth, you had no other place to go. It was just the way the Navy did things.

While the ensign took care of this duty, the engineman in charge held his salute like a gunner’s mate waiting to order the first salvo at Normandy.

The decision as to how long to let a prank nurture and grow is a nautical skill of great respect. You never wanted to humiliate a young officer, you just want to bring him close to wetting his starched, white uniform. After all, he might be the one processing your discharge papers some day and, by then, may have mastered the use of the ancient Naval axiom that “payback is a motherf****r.”

So, before the tears started, the senior sailor present would explain what “jacking shaft” meant. (The explanation was confined to usage aboard ship and not to its more casual usage when used ashore in a bar).

It seems that, when a ship is at rest, the weight of the propeller causes a strain on the propeller shaft. Consequently, when our ship was moored, standing orders required both that it, the shaft, had to be rotated (jacked) periodically to even the strain, and that his precaution had to be approved by the Officer of the Deck.

As for the look on the ensign’s face when elucidation rushed in, like a band of Spartans to the rescue, it was just a little bit of fun in a boring and, otherwise, humorless existence. Protecting your freedoms is a lonely and mirthless task, requiring the garnering of any scrap of relief in sight.

Anchors aweigh, and all that.

Do these faces bespeak cruelty
of any sort whatsoever?